Proper thermal management is critical to the successful operation of many types of devices. Standard industry practice for cooling ruggedized avionics modules, for example, is using a conduction cooling frame that is bonded to a printed circuit board to conduct heat out to an external chassis via a standard interface. An example of such a conventional conduction-cooled card assembly 100 is shown in FIG. 1. As shown, the assembly 100 includes a primary, or host, card 102 having a multi-electrode electrical connector 104 for establishing a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus connection with a motherboard of a chassis (not shown). A secondary, or mezzanine, card 106, is electrically connected with the primary card 102 via PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) or switched mezzanine card (XMC) connectors (not shown in FIG. 1) disposed between the cards 102, 106. The primary card 102 and secondary card 106 are both mounted to a conduction cooling frame 108 using screws 110. Typically, electrical components are mounted on the opposing faces of the cards 102, 106, within the cavity formed between them. As shown, the conduction cooling frame 108 includes thermal management interfaces 112 each having a wedgelock fastener 114 secured to it via screws (not shown). The wedgelock fasteners 114 are used to press the thermal management interfaces 112 against the rails of the chassis so as to allow heat to flow to the chassis through the thermal management interfaces 112.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,324,336 (“the '336 patent”) proposed an adaptor frame that can be used to allow a conduction-cooled card assembly to be installed in a certain type of air-flow cooled chassis. With reference to its FIG. 1, the '336 patent explains that wedgelock fasteners 42, 44 attached to extensions 24a, 24b of thermally conductive plate 24 can be used to secure an adaptor housing 60 between the extensions 24a, 24b and rails 34, thus allowing heat from components on circuit cards 20, 22 to be conducted from the plate 24 to the housing 60 and extracted via air flowing through the housing 60.
Another known approach for allowing cards of conduction-cooled card assemblies, such as cards 102, 106 of assembly 100 shown in FIG. 1, to be employed within an air-cooled chassis is to replace the mezzanine connectors on one or both of the cards with taller connectors so as to create a gap that allows air to flow between the cards, and to mount the cards on a different frame that is designed to allow air to flow between the cards from one side of the chassis to the other.